We’ve had a regular series where CPsquare members and friends go on a virtual field trip to observe something about a community of practice, it’s activities, technologies, or challenges. Today Sylvia Currie and I organized something new — a group of CPsquare members watched two videos on YouTube together using Google-Plus. The idea of watching videos together has a lot of potential although G+ Hangouts seemed a bit messy at this point. It’s those small things like not being able to easily control who joins the Hangout that can create confusion. We experience several surprises:

• It worked perfectly for some: I selected the video, started it for everyone and could pause it at any point. People watching it could enter comments in the chat or talk over the video. But you can only watch videos that are on YouTube, so some of the videos from Pepperdine students that we would have considered for watching were excluded because of where they’d been published.
• Even with a uniformly experienced group with consistently high bandwidth and technology, there were some puzzling differences in experience. When someone speaks, their image jumps to the center of the screen — but their own screen doesn’t show that! Videos showed up on the main screen for some people but were in a completely other window for some. If you have the “video” tab clicked on it shows a “related videos” message after a video has finished. But people who did not have the video tab clicked on saw the regular behavior: the face of the speaker (or recent speaker), jumps up to the center screen as the discussion proceeds.
• I take detailed notes in the chat (and encourage others to join me in that practice). Since my keyboard is loud enough to be distracting during a conversation, I keep muting myself and have to un-mute to speak: it’s really clumsy to do that without a keyboard shortcut of some sort.

Bottom line: although there are clumsy things about it, having YouTube play a video for a small group opens up a lot of really cool possibilities.

Here is the agenda that Sylvia Currie and I had come up with:

In your check-in, give your name, location, and briefly describe any prior experiences attempting to get a group to “observe a CoP”?

After watching each video, we took the following questions one at a time:

• What did we see?
• Comment on the specific community that’s presented — What does it imply about “communities of practice”?
• What’s not shown? What’s not visible?
• As a result of our watching together, what do we see about our own blind spots?

We watched two videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzZQCZxh5w Ice Skating Sensations
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nfo42ci-Ko Joseph Sikeku talks about the technologies he uses at FADECO radio to reach Tanzanian farmers.

Our wrap-up question was: what are some useful and meaningful ways to look at CoPs together?

Here is my list of take-aways:

• Access matters a lot: we’re not allowed to observe some communities (others may need to observe them on our behalf) or their business is so foreign to us that we can’t even understand what they’re about. The best we can do is get incrementally closer.
• Active and successful communities frequently have a support structure in the background that is invisible unless you look for it (which you might not do unless you understand something about the community itself).
• Individual interactions or specific roles are more easily observed than a community as a whole, but it’s that community context that gives meaning to the observable stuff.
• A community leader or convener or tech steward can see connections or relationships between people or tools that other community members may not be able to see (and that an outsider might not have access to).

You have to resort to some shortcuts to follow the conversation about communities of practice or just try to catch up. I have been impressed with recent conversations about communities of practice in LinkedIn, for example. It’s not a place where I would expect to find the topic pop up. In one recent conversation, however, a bunch of references to good articles were cited and Nicky Hayward-Wright ended up not only gathering them together but organizing them into a wonderful update to the Healthcare page on CPsquare’s Wiki bibliography. When you think of it each one of the bibliographies in CPsquare’s Wiki points to a conversation as well. Which brings up the question of the different flavors or meanings of the term.

Thanks to Bev Trayner, I just bumped into a comprehensive bibliography in the business and organizational studies literature that is a full length study of the concept by Enrique Murrillo. Murillo talks about how the concept’s “interpretive viability” makes it flexible but also has associated risks. Murrillo suggests that the recent decline in practitioner-oriented journals is “a symptom of the CoP concept becoming mainstream, an accepted addition to the Management vernacular.”

Essentially, how you use the term is kind of situated — say on whether you’re in healthcare or in business or education — or in the theory-construction business. (In his keynote talk at the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg last May, Etienne Wenger suggested that whether you use the term or not depends on what you want to do.) I have to say that conversations in LinkedIn, CPsquare and com-prac among others, which lean on, borrow from, and occasionally heckle the academic literatures, are alive and well. Keeping a conversation going is an art with enduring interest. Even when you think you’ve figured it out, it seems there are surprises and more to learn. (For example, I thought that Digital Habitats would lead to more of a conversation about technology stewardship than it has so far. I wonder why?)

• An email list, mainly for announcing upcoming calls, although occasionally someone will reply
• A wiki that lists ideas for upcoming calls and describes each speaker and provides some helpful links for each call
• A free phone bridge that makes an audio recording
• A podcast set-up for people who missed the call
• An IRC channel

Here are some of the practices that make it work:

• Short calls at a regular time (nominally 35 minutes, but they often go longer)
• Jerry always reminds people to mute themselves, and there haven’t been too many accidents such as people putting the call on a musical hold
• Jerry’s summary at the end of each call is a feat of comprehension and a useful review that gives you the feeling of a good “take away”
• The IRC channel supports the phone call and lets people share resources, heckle, queue up questions, and greet each other

A few months ago I was in a brainstorming session with Jerry and some other guys to talk about what might be added or changed.  Turns out that improving on this mix is difficult, suggesting that it might be the “minimum that would work” (to use Ward Cunningham’s phrase to describe his design goals for the first wiki).

• There is a twitter-stream which seems to augment the email announcements and supplement, but not replace, the IRC channel
• There is a huge back-channel that makes it all work; among other things, Jerry runs a retreat that brings innovators and techies together once a year

Thinking about this digital habitat led me to think about the business model or economic niche around this community.  I took a crack at describing it using Alexander Osterwalder‘s business model canvas:

Obviously there is a lot more to say and my guesses may be off, but:

• Whatever the mix of technologies and other resources are that support Yi-Tan, they work.  Three hundred weekly calls is about as close to “sustainable” as we get these days.  Whatever the business model of the Yi-Tan community is, it works.
• There is something really important about free-standing communities like Yi-Tan: they generate a lot of cross-pollination and idea-hatching.  I’m sure a lot of other people go to these calls just for the mind-stretching.  But the business model question is most important for just that kind of community (I’m not saying that Osterwalder’s scheme exactly works to describe the workings of a community, but it’s closer than anything else I’ve seen.)
• There is a kind of fitness and leanness about the Yi-Tan community’s set-up that those of us who work to set up and support communities for a living should think hard about.  Lavish support can lead to stupor so we need to be careful to not aim to set our fees as a percentage of whatever lavishness can be squeezed out of a corporation or a grant.

A very nice practice that was not emphasized enough in the opening session was having dozens of etherpad rooms configured so that you could easily find where the note-taking should be going on.  Since it’s a wiki page, you could come through afterward and name your session and point directly to the meeting notes.  The session pitching part of the day was a little messier than the Recent Changes Camp because the PA system was a bit flaky and nobody was trying to make the announcement process orderly.  So people did their thing.  In a couple of sessions I was the only one taking notes — the idea of taking notes together seems strange to a lot of people.  That might be worth a little instruction at the beginning of a the day.

I had prepared to do a session on Business Models for communities.  I’ve been thinking about the issue of how communities can get formal enough to have conferences, websites, technology stewards and other staff without loosing their freshness and learning passion for many years now.  Josien Kapma and I have been working on the issue for years and this year’s “shadow the leader” series in CPsquare has focused on her experience with Dutch expatriate dairy farmers.  But I keep having this nagging feeling that there is so much more to the issue.  Maybe there’s a book there.

Anyway, to fish for new ideas and ways into these issues, I went to a copy center and printed the PDF on 3′ by 4′ paper.  Lugging it to the conference and back on a bicycle was not so fun.  The discussion was good: having a big poster-sized canvas was effective because it brought out the unconscious differences in our assumptions.  See the notes on the conference Wiki.  Thanks to Ann Marcus for taking notes during the session.

What was most confusing in the discussion was basic: business model for what?  Some people wanted to talk about a business model for a community entirely sponsored by one company, whether an “inward-facing community” or an “outward-facing community”.  (In this context people are almost always talking about exclusively online communities.)  The tricky thing is that the conversation slipped into one about justifying community to a company that’s asking for an explicit return on investment.  I think a business model exercise is probably part of justifying community-support efforts to a company. But to have a useful conversation in a short period of time (where we didn’t have much time to figure out where each other was coming from ) I had proposed that for discussion we we use the Community Leadership Summit itself as a sample community because that was the context that we all shared at the moment and we all had a bit of information on how things were working.

After I got home I transcribed the really messy text into something that’s more legible.  You can download the PPT here.  The “post-its” can be easily copied and moved around.

In addition to the etherpad resource “rooms” there was supposedly an IRC channel going on.  I could never find it. It seemed to me that there was more of an ensemble note-taking and hanging out scene going on on Twitter using the #cls10 hash-tag.  I still like http://wthashtag.com/Cls10 as a mechanism for capturing tweets during a conference. Once you set up the page, it does a lot of gathering and tracking for you. Great transcript afterward and nice stats, too.

I also ran a session on technology stewardship on the spur of the moment.  That is, I proposed it, facilitated it, took most of the notes, and, according to one participant, talked too much, too.

I thought it was very interesting how some 20-30 people gathered together to help one person figure out how they might move one community “beyond an email list.”  Another reminder that a great way to learn is to try to help someone else.

Hanging Out uses “genres of participation” with new media as a way of describing everyday learning and media engagement. The primary distinction that the authors make is between “friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.” (p. 15)  “Participation” is an alternative to an internalization or consumption perspective.  It has the advantage in not assuming that kids are passive, mere audiences to media or educational content. “Hanging out” refers to friendships and social interactions that are oriented to local networks. “Messing around” refers to exploring, playing, cruising around, “finding stuff” – intermediate between the other two categories. “Geeking out” is participation that’s more oriented toward expertise, delving in a particular topic or technology.  “Transitioning between hanging out, messing around, and geeking out represents certain trajectories of participation that young people can navigate, where their modes of learning and their social networks and focus begin to shift.” (p. 17)

Megan Finn was the lead author in the section that discusses the “techne-mentor” in depth (on pp. 59-60).  A couple long quotes describes the techne-mentor concept:

“In conceptualizing the media and information ecologies in the lives of University of California at Berkeley freshmen, classical adoption and diffusion models (e.g., Rogers [1962; 2003]) proved inadequate. Rather than being characterized by a few individuals who diffuse knowledge to others in a somewhat linear fashion, many students’ pattern of technology adoption signaled situations in which various people were at times influential in different, ever-evolving social networks. The term “techne-mentor” is used to help to describe this pattern of information and knowledge diffusion….  Techne-mentor refers to a role that someone plays in aiding an individual or group with adopting or supporting some aspect of technology use in a specific  context, but being a techne-mentor is not a permanent role.

“In the Freshquest study we found many cases of techne-mentors. The kind of roles they played varied from case to case and situation to situation. On one hand, the techne-mentor may simply make someone aware of a technology. On the other hand, he or she may play an integral role in demonstrating the technology practice or even installing the technology and ensuring its status as operational. Sometimes students we interviewed had one primary techne-mentor in their lives, but in turn the students would take on the role when they passed this information on to other groups. In fact, it is this constant flow of information about technology among a student’s multitude of social networks that accounts for the fluidity of the role of techne-mentor. In all these socially situated contexts, techne-mentors were an integral part of informal learning and teaching about technology and technology practices.”

Techne-mentors show up in all the genres of participation but their role is probably more visible at the geeking out end of the spectrum.  That is, as technology becomes a more central concern, learning and talking about technology also becomes more central and so does mentoring.  It’s really important that the way Hanging Out uses the concept, kids are involved both in being mentored and mentoring others.

A “tech steward” is a specific kind of techne-mentor, working on behalf of a community, mentoring and being mentored in the context of that community.   A technology steward is influenced by their social context.  In geeky communities such as the Ubuntu community that Andreas Lloyd studied, everyone is concerned with technology in one way or another, although some people are more influential than others.  In thinking about the “hanging out” end of the spectrum it occurs to me that the job of technology stewards is partly to make technology disappear.  People really want to be hanging out with each other, talking about hawks in Central Park or milking cows in Portugal. The more intuitive and habitual a community’s technology infrastructure becomes, the more authentic and direct the experience of being in the community.

As we wrote Digital Habitats and began focusing on technology stewards who we encountered in different communities, we were struck by the fact that they came from many different backgrounds.  That as far as their role was concerned, they were not “trained” in any conventional sense.  Looping back to Hanging Out, that makes a lot of sense:

“Sociocultural approaches to learning have recognized that kids gain most of their knowledge and competencies in contexts that do not involve formal instruction. A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.” (p. 21)

That’s a very polite way of saying that school is, in some important respects, irrelevant.  It applies to kids as well as to grown-up technology stewards.

“One of the key innovations of situated learning theory was to posit that learning was an act of social participation in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). By shifting the focus away from the individual and to the broader network of social relationships, situated learning theory suggests that the relationships of knowledge sharing, mentoring, and monitoring within social groups become key sites of analytic interest. In this formulation, people learn in all contexts of activity, not because they are internalizing knowledge, culture, and expertise as isolated individuals, but because they are part of shared cultural systems and are engaged in collective social action.“  (p. 14)

Learning to learn about technology (in particular) from this point of view is a fundamental skill that results from hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.  To me this suggests that people who learn about technology in school are cheated because they miss out on some fundamental hanging out experiences.  In this sense, the “digital divide” between older people who have been subject to training and younger people who came by their knowledge more socially may be more of a “learning divide.” That makes a lot of classroom instruction about technology irrelevant.

Beware of any technology steward who tells you that they learned how to do it in school.

During the Foundations workshop we try to establish the practice of using a teleconference to think together in a very open, self-organizing and relaxed way, allowing the conversation to turn in whatever direction seems to make sense. And we support that practice with MP3 recordings and a chat that captures the main point of our meanderings. It turns out that the logic of the conversation may not be clear at all in advance, but in retrospect you can always see how it makes a lot of sense. I personally have learned a lot about myself, how I facilitate or participate and how I interact with different people by listening to the recordings we make (primarily for the benefit of people who didn’t make it to a meeting). The chat transcripts are very handy for looking up ideas, getting URLs, or making a summary of the conversation. All of that collective context and experience is the base from which we could cantilever out.

At one recent meeting of this group someone was talking about using video for community meetings. We decided to hold a more focused meeting this last time where we experimented with one tool.

Last week we experimented with TokBox.com, a video meeting tool. It’s a free tool that sets up a “Hollywood Squares” kind of format where everyone can see everyone else who has a video cam. In a way *the way that we explored it* is was as interesting as the tool itself. Two people met on TokBox beforehand and found that they had some audio feedback problems, so we decided to use the CPsquare phone bridge for the session’s audio channel. Someone sent out an email invitation to all the workshop participants, (whether they’d participated in these interim check-ins or not). It named the phone bridge as the initial meeting point and the first thing each person had to do when they arrived at the TokBox meeting page was find the mute button so that anything they said (or heard through the TokBox audio feed) wouldn’t disrupt the conversation. One of the people who had explored the tool beforehand sent out session invitations during the call by email as people showed up on the phone bridge.

It’s obvious that to explore a social tool like TokBox you can’t do it alone. You need partners. But to find out how it supports a conversation, you need to have a conversation. So you need other people who share your language, are willing to explore the tool, and can connect (and re-connect when you fall off the call). In particular it’s helpful to have a back-channel, whether email or a Skype chat. Several back-channels are helpful, actually. Our phone bridge was a back-channel and the backbone of our conversation. We cantilevered out from there. And the standard against which we measured the tool was known to all: our previous conversations on the phone bridge.

In addition to the phone bridge connection, during the session several of us were also connected via a Skype group chat. Most but not all of us were on the TokBox site. Several people didn’t have a video connection (or maybe they were having a bad hair day?) and one just listened in on the phone (e.g., a mobile phone while driving). At different points we experimented with TokBox’s auxiliary tools like its chat tool, its etherpad, and some others. All of that makes for a very complicated group structure. All of us could hear, but what each person could see was not the same.

The conversation was very much about observing out loud what we were seeing, considering how it worked for us, and thinking about how it would work for the several groups that each of us work with professionally. Was there value in seeing other people’s faces via the group video? (Answer: for some, but not all.) How would the tool work for a lecture or for a more horizontal conversation? What were the set-up issues in terms of inviting other people to join on the fly? Was there a difference between using the TokBox email invitation tool and sending the URL by some other means? (Answer: not much.) Although some web conferencing software completely lock down the structure and shape of the interface, TokBox lets you float video windows around, open and close apps like etherpad, and much more. What are the benefits of that kind of malleability? Does it also cause problems? (One of us kept getting dumped from the video connection whenever we entered an etherpad window. We never figured out why.) We compared TokBox to others that we’ve been exploring, including:

• Google’s Open Meetings
• Adobe Connect
• Elluminate
• DimDim

(there are more tools mentioned on the CPsquare wiki)

From this example, I’m left thinking of three different overlapping questions:

• How does a community explore existing variance in the use of a tool?  What are the benefits of or problems with uniform competence in using a tool once a group has settled on it?  In this example, some people didn’t want to use video at all or found that it didn’t add much to their experience of closeness beyond what our phone bridge provides.  For others it added quite a bit of context and sense of closeness that was useful.
• Is it always clear what tool we cantilever from?  Does that matter?  Different groups might use different technologies and will have different amounts of trust or determination to explore.  In this example, we used email to get everyone on a phone bridge from which we all got into TokBox.  Stragglers got caught up via Skype chat.  This is related with the “one more tool” question that Patricia Arnold, Beverly Trayner and I asked in the paper we gave at the Networked Learning Conference 210 a few weeks ago.
• A final question is about what this process of exploration does to the group itself.  Can it be outsourced?  Can we leverage the experience of others?  What are the implications of having others do the exploration for us, be they experts in your company’s IT department or technology stewards or whomever?  In this example we were very much doing it for ourselves and that certainly colors our experience.  How important is first hand experience of exploration?

TokBox came out looking really good! And it was great to see our learning companions!

Photo by Pete Lewis.

But there are are also differences between the two. Quoting from the Table 2.2 on p. 42 of Cultivating Communities of Practice (Wenger et al., 2002) proposes these differences:

Sometimes the two blur and the difference may be more about a point of view than anything else. In fact, it may be useful to think of project teams as if they were communities of practice in some cases, especially when teams are globally distributed, learning is a fundamental component of their assignment, and project scope is to be discovered as the project proceeds. Here are some ideas about when a community perspective on technology such as we propose in Digital Habitats may be useful for a project team:

• There are many cultural and technological uncertainties that come up when a project team is global. A part of the project’s work needs to be focused on learning how to cope with differences in time zones, bandwidth, technology environment, language, customs regarding deadlines or commitments, etc., etc. All of those elements have technology implications. The improvisational, emergent, approach we develop in Digital Habitats, and the frameworks we develop such as the polarities in Chapter 5, help us think about how to get conversations to address tricky questions issues such as, “How do we work together?”
• Who is on a project team is not always as clear as we’d like. Sometimes a key resource or contributor will be part of the network or surrounding community but not part of the formal project team. When the knowledge and skills required for a project are very cutting-edge or very diverse, project team membership sometimes can’t be known in advance, much less specified. All of the discussion about permeable community boundaries will apply in those situations because team members may need to bring an expert into a few technology-mediated conversations, not involve them in the whole project’s work-space. During the project of writing Digital Habitats, Nancy White kept repeating “Technology is used collectively but experienced individually,” (or something to that effect) till Etienne and I could say it on cue. In my observation, communities are expert at dealing with the differences in people’s experience of technology and somehow inventing ways of bringing people together despite the obstacles.
• Even when a community isn’t sponsoring a project, sometimes the community is the critical sounding-board or peanut gallery for the project. Unless the project team pays careful attention to the larger community’s conversations, the project will fail. For a distributed, technology-mediated team that may require that project team members stay involved in the conversations or activities of that surrounding community (which have more fuzzy and ad hoc technology boundaries than what we normally think about as “the project area”).
• When you observe projects in real life they are quite diverse, not just the instantiation so many Gantt charts. If we look closely we might find projects that are oriented toward “meetings,” “open ended conversations,” or “access to expertise,” or “relationships” much like the orientations for communities that we propose in Chapter 6. If those orientations have technology implications, the surely the orientations in projects must also.
• Finally, when a long-running project team experiences member turn-over, there’s a need to bring new members of the team into the team’s culture and tell them the stories from the team’s history. That sounds like the time for community thinking to me. Bottom line, there is more self-selection going on in project activities than an “everybody is on task in this project” kind of perspective would suggest.

Of course there’s the question of whether project teams can learn more from communities or the other way around.

To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s context and experience.  How we talk about the buttons and about people’s experience matters, given that we have so many tools to choose from, that we use them in tandem and that that the tools a community uses interact with each other in complex ways.   The experience using a tool and of talking about it affects usability, learning and collaboration.  This matters even more when we’re talking about technology at a community level.  Skype is complex enough to demonstrate the issues involved in understanding a community platform (even though we usually think of it as a personal tool). This post uses the language we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of how Skype fits in the technology landscape.

First of all, Skype is not just one tool. It’s a platform with lots of different tools on top of it. The tools in Skype are essential for my work as a community leader. If you follow this discussion about how all of them work together, you’ll have a good example of the approach we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of platforms in a way that brings out the issues around tool comparison, duplication, and integration.

A phone

It looks like a phone

The most obvious thing to notice about Skype is that it works like a phone. (Another phone? I already have several! My phone call arbitrage is complicated enough: I pay a flat fee for my plain old telephone system (POTS) land line for local calls and for long-distance within the US. And I already have a pre-pay scheme for cheap international phone calls! And I have a cell phone in my pocket. Why do I need another phone?) Well, Skype is actually two phone tools that have useful features in and of themselves and are integrated with other Skype tools that I’ll talk about below. The two phone tools are different in that one is for calling a POTS phone with a number and another for calling other Skype users (with a Skype ID)

One-to-one interaction on-the-spur of the moment is ideal for reaching out to community members – to find out what’s on their minds or provide exactly the help that they happen to need at that moment. In my community work I make it a point to ask people for their POTS phone numbers or Skype IDs.

In this post I discuss several Skype tools (not all of them) in terms of how their features are useful, how they work with each other and how they work with tools on other platforms that people in my community might use.  In a way this puts to work some of the analytical framework we develop in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats. The polarities discussed in Chapter 5 are a big help in organizing our thinking about these issues.  So I represent each tool with a screen-shot and a diagram below it suggesting how the polarities seem to me at the moment.  The phone diagram shown below indicates that I think the phone is on the participation end (unless you reify the conversation with a recording); you have to participate in real time, so it’s synchronous (exchanging voice-mails moves the red triangle toward asynchronous); and it’s a one-to-one experience, so I place it close to the individual end of the spectrum.  The placements in this diagram then determine the placement of the tool in a tool landscape at the end of the post.

My impression of Skype as a phone

Each of the two phone tools has its interface: the Skype-to-POTS interface has a keypad that looks like the keypad on a regular phone. When clicking on the keypad gets tedious, you can just type in the number you’re calling in a text box labeled “Enter phone number.”

Lots to do with a contact

Notice that the two tools are really different in cost and function: it costs a small amount to call someone on a regular phone and you can’t receive a call back from them unless you buy a POTS number from Skype. A Skype-to-Skype call is free and it’s very easy for someone to call you back if they miss your call.  Integration asymmetries between Skype and other platforms force different interfaces, so make me think that Skype has two different phone tools.

Contact list

You make a call to another Skype user using its contacts list tool. The contacts tool partly overlaps with my Outlook, Gmail, and mobile phone contacts tools, but it does things that the others don’t. One is to show who’s currently “available,” indicated by a green dot with a check-mark in it, so it works like a global “presence indicator.” Also, you can group contacts, rename them, send them to other Skype users and perform various other actions.

Your personal contacts list is available whenever you log onto Skype – from whatever machine you use. (Surprisingly, the same account can be logged on from two different machines.) When you click on a Skype contact, you have the choice of calling their regular phone, which will cost you but is more attention-getting, or calling them on Skype which only “rings” on their computer.

In my opinion the most polite way to reach someone is to first check if they are available using the text chat tool (discussed next) and then call them on Skype or by regular phone only after the other party has responded that it’s OK to call. If we’ve made an appointment to talk and the other party doesn’t respond, I may call them on their regular phone, which rings loudly (and may be a mobile phone that they carry with them).

Chat: SMS and alert

Like the phones, Skype’s text chat tool is complicated: it’s the same on the front end, but different on the back end.

I'm running late

The text chat with other Skype users is a full-bore chat tool: like an instant message tool but better because it’s integrated with other Skype tools. For me it is the most frequently used of all Skype’s tools. Messages can be long and replying is easy. The interface is clean and it’s very robust: people are not dropped off a chat and they receive chat text even if their machine crashes. Skype keeps the chats on your machine since you installed it and you can search through them.

You can send a 160-character SMS text message to a mobile phone from the same window you use to call a POTS number (provided the number goes with a mobile phone). That’s handy but asymmetrical because a reply message from a mobile phone can only go back to another mobile, not to you on Skype. So it works more like an alert than a conversation tool.

Skype alert

Nancy White and I regularly use the Skype text chat as an alert – to drop notes off on each other’s desks. Often the drop-off is a URL and the message is no more than “Hey, look at this!” A direct message on Twitter or the inbox feature on http://delicious.com would be obvious alternatives, but on a windows machine Skype blinks so it’s visible and hard to miss. No response is required but an alert can lead to extended conversations.

Chat is one of the most versatile tools we have. A chat is useful for alerts, for sharing, for conversations, for negotiating meeting times, and on and on. It’s ironic that there are so many different and incompatible chat protocols and tools. Once you have a chat connection with someone the possibilities for collaboration increase dramatically.

A profile that gets used

How many profiles have you grudgingly completed in your life, imagining that someone you really need to be in touch with will find you? One for each community tool you have ever used, perhaps. If you’re like me, you’ve completed dozens of them and probably most of them are now out of date! Our likelihood of keeping them up-to-date depends on how frequently we use a tool or how close at hand the profile tool is. I keep my Skype profile current because I consider it an interaction tool, not just a publication. Skype’s profiles are in a proprietary format and not available outside of Skype.  However you can send a profile to another Skype user.

The Skype profile tool is an example of a tool that’s mostly an individual’s public description of themselves. But when you use the “mood message” to let people know where in the world you are or what you’re doing, it’s an interaction kick-off.

Hello world

Skype makes other people’s profiles useful by letting you modify or add to the information that they provide. Skype lets you edit other people’s names, which I find is handy if people haven’t completed their profile. Also, if you have a private phone number for someone that they don’t post on their profile, you can add it to your copy of their profile.

Skype would be a useful platform just for its one-to-one phone calls and text messages, but it becomes indispensable because the audio and text tools work in a many-to-many mode. Skype as a conferencing tool makes it a real community platform, especially given how all the other tools are integrated on the platform. Here again the user interface masks differences on the back end. A group chat is extremely robust, working in a point-to-point fashion: any one of those on the chat can drop out (e.g., turn of their computer) without affecting the others. And when Skype comes back up, the intervening text messages that were exchanged among the other parties to the chat magically appear on the machine that dropped out.

Group Chats

Chat is the workhorse

Audio conferences (not shown in a screen shot) are different: all the audio signals go through the computer of the “host” who initiates the call. If the host drops, the audio call ends for everyone. It’s important for an audio conference to be initiated by the person with the fastest and most stable Internet bandwidth: if the host is on a dial-up connection or an overloaded wi-fi network, it will impact everyone.

Another difference between audio conferences and text chats has to do with scale. A large number of people can be on a text chat, but an audio conference starts getting noisy and unstable well before running up against the Skype maximum of 9 callers.If everyone is on Skype, conference calling and group chat are nicely integrated. You have a “call Group button” to launch an audio conference from a text chat and a chat transcript appears automatically when you are on a group chat.

When a group is working on a project over a long period, for example, a long-running Skype chat is a great way to keep everybody connected and focused. Ten weeks is the record in my experience. When you turn on your computer in the morning, all the conversations between people in different time zones pop up.  The flexibility of chat makes it an ideal tools for coordinating work on other platforms.

Contact groups

Which list are you on?

Over time you accumulate a lot of contacts in Skype and it’s very helpful that Skype lets you organize them into Groups. Skype automatically creates some groups, such as “recently contacted” or “requests from new contacts.”  But you can create as many groups as you want.  Adding people to or removing them from a group is easy and you can put people in multiple groups.

The groups tool is useful in combination with other tools.  For example, when you select a group, you can easily see who is currently logged on to Skype.  What that means depends on whether being logged on to Skype at a given point is a norm in that group of people or not.  A Skype group makes it easy to start a group chat or a group audio conference.  One advantage of using a group to set up a chat is that you include people whether they are logged on or not; when they do log on, the chat messages will pop up on their computer.

So what?

Classification a tool using these polarities always seems debatable..  We developed them as a natural way to help a technology steward take a step back from the hands-on level and think about the experiences that enable a community to be together and to learn.  This tour of Skype is not meant to prove anything: it’s more suggesting a way of making sense of a technology.   Here are some parting thoughts:

• The polarities and how they play off of each other are intuitive  and practical. They are most useful as a stimulus for conversation.
• Tech stewards need to understand what it’s like to use a tool and to be able to talk about the experience and the tool separately.
• Preferred, ignored, duplicate, or competing tools all make sense within this social and technical mix we call a digital habitat.
• Each software feature makes sense within the context of a tool, and each tool is framed by its position on a platform, which has meaning in the context of a configuration that’s shared by a group of people.
• In a way it’s all circular because you can’t see a community’s configuration (or digital habitat) directly or simply.
  • You can’t stand outside of your own digital habitat
  • You can’t really see a community unless you’re participating in its habitat
  • Seeing a community’s habitat as members see it requires relationships and access to their practices, habits, and cultural context
  • Understanding the role of a tool in a habitat involves a sense of shared timing and even group improvisation

A provisional placing of Skype tools on the digital landscape

What do you think?

(Cross-posted on the Digital Habitats blog.)

Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me.   How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?

My days of passive participation are over and done with:

• For me, the reason to go to a big conference is the small group conversations with people I already know somewhat or with whom I share a common interest
• We have the tools to coordinate and connect before, during and after the event — to keep the conversation going (it starts before the conference and goes afterward as well)

I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat.  During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream.  And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference.   And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.

Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect.  The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences.  The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations.

Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes.  It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).

Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.

• Emergent intention.  Early on nobody knows for sure who will be there and therefore whether it’s worth going.  Email discussions about who’s going are key to establishing that there will be some kind of quorum which would make a long trip worthwhile.  But at a certain point, tagging the resources that emerge is essential.  Four months after tagging the AoIR conference, for example, we noticed that the EPIC conference was scheduled the same week.  That coincidence turned out to be a key to the dynamics of the conversation.
• Fuzzy social boundaries.  Tagging is open in the sense that anybody can use it and it’s visible to everyone. Tagging prospective participants or presentations is a way of encouraging participation.  Looking at the tagstream, for example, you can see that Sus Nyrop, who did participate, was hoping that Christina Costa would join us (although she couldn’t make it in the end).
• Identification of relevant resources .  Being together at a conference may focus on a particular topic, but you have to identify a lot of other relevant resources like where to stay.  We used the lodging page from a previous conference in Copenhagen to figure out where our group might stay.
• Multiple outputs. Active participation generates a lot of different outputs. Tagging is the ideal way to keep track of them.  Delicious links are here. Flickr photos are here.  Not much video produced at that conference.
• Distributed leadership. Although I used the “cp2oir08” tag more than anybody else, others used it as well.  The goal is to coax people to contribute, whether it’s a tag you came up with or not.

Tips

• Propose a tag early.  Announce it by email or by other means to get the word out.
• Tag should be as intuitive and descriptive as it can be but as short as possible.
• Weave tagging into group practice and tagged resources into the conversation.  Mention what’s been tagged by you or what you’ve found in the tagstream that others should know about.
• Think of the tagstream a community-building resource. A tagstream is the accumulation of tagged materials contributed by everyone, which  is stored on a tagging platform such as delicious, and which retrieved or monitored via an RSS feed (but which can also be viewed as a web page).
• Identify related or parallel tags (such as “ir9” that was used for the AoIR conference as a whole on Flickr, delicious, and Twitter).
• Think of the tagstream as an ideal research tool, when you’re going back to figure out what happened or when.

Photo by Bev Trayner.

• 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station
• Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder
• Mobile phones

Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones.  (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009  issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels).  One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon.  Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled.  Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor.  Here’s a 7 minute interview:

Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:

• Radio broadcasts are a remarkable technology for bringing people together across great distances.  It’s so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
• But radio is a very group-oriented tool, so tools like an audio recorder or a mobile phone pull the community’s configuration toward the individual end of the polarity.
• An audio recorder supports the asynchronous side and the mobile phones (either as audio devices or for text messages) support the synchronous.

It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings.  And the final question: will these ideas be useful?

I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months.  I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference).  The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.”  But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive.  A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.

The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities.  Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic.  At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.”  That was very gratifying.

(Cross-posted to our Digital Habitats blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com.)